I want to shuffle the chapter 6 packages to match LFS, and add the utf8 stuff.
I also want to remove the blfs packages and maybe the network (inetutils and
iproute2) packages, to make HLFS a purely development system.
robert
Maybe we should state the overall goal of HLFS first!
What do you mean by "purely development system"? What should one be able to do
out of the box? If you remove networking there won't be much of an usable system
left...
The HLFS home page states:
This book will initially be geared towards building production-quality
servers, routers, and firewalls. Many BLFS <http://lfs.aliensoft.org/blfs/index.html>
packages will compile and run as-is and work is under way to support the most
problematic desktop tools as well.
I personally think this is still a valid goal.
Also: is it necessary to be so tight on the number of packages in Ch.6?
Of course there is no need to install unnecessary packages which are already
explained in BLFS, but things such as gradm etc. are special to HLFS and should
be included. Other packages are essential to getting a minimal working linux
system (network). Others (such as blowfish) need to be compiled in Ch.6 because
they
replace existing libraries other packages in Ch.6 depend on, etc.
So I think that it's impossible to reduce the number any further - we probably
need
to increase the number of installed packages in Ch.6 by 2 or 3.
If you want to include UTF8 you should be aware that there are still lots of
problems with UTF8. I still have to find a distro which supports UTF8
in the same unproblematic way as say "en_US". Eg. I have not yet seen
a distro which manages to display correctly man pages, allows you to compile
perl modules out of the box and has a properly setup vim in German locale
with UTF8.
Especially if you think about it: locales are only supported by the "small"
utility programs such as man, bash, mount, etc. Every "big" application
such as databases or OpenOffice has its own way of dealing with locales
(eg. you might be writing a letter with quotes in other languages or a
database must contain several languages, etc.) The single locale setting
is really only used by terminal/console utilities - and most of them
don't even support locales (apart from their man pages). So although
my mother-tongue <http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=/gQPU.&search=mother-tongue> is German, I leave my locale setting set to en_US.
I read man pages in English and can be sure that every program in the world
runs without problems. My server is serving the internet with German content
and the database handles German without problems!
I know that other people may think differently and think that UTF8 is cute.
That's ok! I just wanted to make the point so that people are aware what
they might be awaiting.
Sorry for the lengthy mail!
Sebastian Faulborn
Homepage: http://www.secure-slinux.org
--
http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/hlfs-dev
FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/
Unsubscribe: See the above information page
